Watching the last knockings of the Arsenal v Liverpool game on Thursday night, the loudest noise around the Emirates was the silence. Here’s a team that was about to go six points clear with just 17 games left, ticking off a draw against the reigning champions. They were doing exactly the thing that you need to do if you’re going to win the thing that you’ve been chasing for nearly a quarter of a century – and it was so quiet you could all but hear the grass grow.
The Premier League has one outstanding team. Arsenal have lost just twice all season, they’re unbeaten since December 6th and have just negotiated the sniper’s alley of the Christmas programme with four wins and a draw. They only have five games left against teams currently in the top eight – and only one against a side in the top four. This is all going very, very well for Arsenal.
Run your finger through their line-ups and they probably have the best first 11. They definitely have the best first 18. Mikel Arteta brought on five subs on Thursday night and still left internationals like Mikel Merino, Christian Norgaard and Ben White on the bench. Arne Slot only brought on Joe Gomez when Conor Bradley got hurt and left a mixture of academy players and utility filler-inners in their tracksuits.
(As a quick aside, Gary Neville might not be right about much but he was spot-on about the Liverpool players during the kerfuffle that followed Bradley’s injury. Gabriel Martinelli hit Bradley with the ball and then tried to hoosh him out over the sideline even as Bradley writhed in obvious agony. How he wasn’t grabbed by the throat by the other Liverpool players beggars belief.
Put it this way – Martinelli was probably lucky it was Liverpool in the Premier League he was playing rather than Aghyaran in the Tyrone Intermediate Championship. We can take it Bradley’s GAA clubmates might not have been as understanding about the whole thing as his soccer ones.)
But even allowing for the fact that maybe the crowd and the players were a little shellshocked at seeing Bradley stretchered off so late in the game, it still feels like there is something lacking in the general Arsenal embrace of their situation. Why did the final whistle on Thursday night sound and feel like the end of Mass on a Tuesday morning? Why the long faces?
Gabriel Martinelli of Arsenal receives a yellow card for his reaction to Conor Bradley's injury - he is lucky he didn't try that during a Tyrone intermediate championship game. Photograph: Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images
Gabriel Martinelli of Arsenal receives a yellow card for his reaction to Conor Bradley's injury - he is lucky he didn't try that during a Tyrone intermediate championship game. Photograph: Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images
[Mary Hannigan: Arsenal give masterclass in not counting your title chickens before they hatchOpens in new window ]
Arsenal had just hosted one of the tiny handful of teams who can feasibly beat them between now and May and skipped away unscratched. That’s not nothing. Nobody expects them to be firing up We Are The Champions with 17 games to go but some bit of acknowledgement of a milestone cleared was surely in order. That’s not the mood music they’re playing right now though.
Talk to any Arsenal supporter and the nervousness and catastrophising is still in full swing. They worry about not having a striker, despite the fact that they’re the second highest scorers in the league. They have the most clean sheets (10) and the fewest goals conceded (14) but all that does is make them fret about what happens if there’s an injury in the back four or to Declan Rice. They have the deepest squad in world football but they’re so scarred by the ghosts of disasters past that they can’t allow themselves to enjoy it.
On the face of it, this is understandable. Arsenal haven’t won a title for so long that it’s bound to be hard for the whole ecosystem around the club and its supporters to allow themselves to believe it’s finally within reach. When you’ve known such bad times for so long, you don’t expect anything else. You live in perpetual fear of your team bottling the whole thing yet again.
A general view of the build-up inside the Emirates Stadium before the Arsenal v Liverpool game. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
A general view of the build-up inside the Emirates Stadium before the Arsenal v Liverpool game. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
But go through those 21 losing seasons since their last title and the record shows that Arsenal’s reputation for throwing away league titles isn’t actually fair at all. For one thing, they’re usually gone long before now so the charge of bottling it doesn’t usually arise.
This is only the fifth time since 2004 that they’ve been on top of the table in early January. They’ve only been top in March twice and only once in April. That was in 2023 when they were five points clear on April 22nd – the problem was Manchester City had two games in hand. Three wins from their last nine games was bad though. It’s not going to get it done.
So yes, they have occasionally made a mess of the run-in, just not as often as you think. In 2016, they were top of the league and only lost three games between Christmas and the end of the season. It would have been enough to beat everybody, except that Leicester took 50 points from a possible 60 in their last 20 games to romp to the title. Not much Arsenal – or anyone – could do about that.
Bukayo Saka of Arsenal fouls Milos Kerkez of Liverpool during their Premier League match on Thursday night. Photograph: Marc Atkins/Getty Images
Bukayo Saka of Arsenal fouls Milos Kerkez of Liverpool during their Premier League match on Thursday night. Photograph: Marc Atkins/Getty Images
Can it happen again? Sure. Is it likely to? Never say never but when you look around this season’s runners and riders, it’s very hard to pick one coming from the clouds. Clearly, City are always capable of putting a run together but their squad looks oddly thin and they haven’t won any of their last three games. Nothing in Aston Villa’s recent history says they can keep this going for another four months. Everyone else is too far back.
It’s Arsenal’s title. Their main danger, it seems, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby they fill their stadium with fingernail-biting worry warts for the next few months, their stress infecting the players and vice-versa, until the whole thing implodes in a mushroom crowd of anxiety and stress.
Buck up now, Arsenal fans. That’s no way to live.